The 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Challenge Continues in our New Community

Visit Building a Better Blog

Over the past few days, the Building a Better Blog challenge participants have been emailing about the end of the challenge and the fact that we were going to really miss this community of bloggers we'd begun. We also discovered that many of us wanted to continue with challenging ourselves on a regular basis to improve our blogs and to have a forum where we could discuss various blogging ideas and issues, like what to do when your organization realizes you've been blogging on your own or how transparent should you be in building an online identity. So Saturday night, the Building a Better Blog community was born. If you're interested in discussing blogging and how to improve the quality of your blog, we want to invite you to join.

The Building a Better Blog Community
Although the community is evolving, what we'd like to do with Building a Better Blog is:

• Provide weekly challenges that will help us all continue to learn and grow as bloggers. We loved the challenge format--although one a day was a bit much--so we wanted to continue doing this on a regular basis. The challenges will be totally voluntary and everyone can pick and choose which ones they'd like to do.

• Create a space where members can discuss various issues related to blogging and to using blogs individually and as organizational tools. Blogging is still a very new medium and many of us are facing all kinds of issues in terms of how to effectively use blogs. In the Building a Better Blog community we want to provide an opportunity for people to explore issues like online identity, transparency, organizational blogging policies and how to use blogs in a variety of ways.

• Persuade "newbies" to begin blogging. For many of us, one of the most satisfying outcomes of the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project was inspiring others to begin blogging. Through the community we want to provide that motivation, as well as tools, resources and advice to help new bloggers "just do it."

• Help established bloggers take their blogs to the next level. The beauty of the challenge format for all of us was that it took us out of our comfort zones and had us accomplishing things with our blogs that we'd never thought about before. This is something we hope to continue through additional challenges and community interaction.

• Create opportunities for smaller communities of practice to develop. Through the "Group" feature in our community, we also want to provide members with a way to form blogging communities of practice that address issues specific to their particular blogging niche, the platforms they use (i.e., Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad) or around interests, like online identity or blogging policies.

As I said, the community is in the very beginning stages and is continuing to evolve. These are only a few of the things we hope to do with Building a Better Blog. If you're at all interested in starting a blog or in working with other bloggers to improve your blog and discuss blogging issues, we encourage you to join us.

To Join Building a Better Blog
If you're already a member of Ning (the platform we used to create the community), you just have to go to  Building a Better Blog and then sign in.

If this will be your first time joining a Ning network,  go to this page and sign up for your account where you'll also be able to join the community.

If you have any problems or questions, as always feel free to email me or leave a comment. I hope we'll see you at Building a Better Blog.

Comments

[Danielle B. Blogging for Balance]

I hope you don't mind that I joined this. My blog has undergone some very significant (and productive) changes with your help and the suggestions made during the 31 day challenge (many of which are still on my to do list). I am currently changing over to Wordpress with my own domain..I heard through the grapevine that there are some issues about being taken seriously if you have a blogspot address. Anyway, this is a marvelous idea and I would love to be a part of it. Again, I hope that you don't mind.

[Michele Martin]

Of course I don't mind, Danielle! It's why we started the site. We definitely want people to join us so anyone can come on over and dive in!